1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods and systems for obtaining efficient, high volume certified digital signatures, which may be suited for use in business, medical, legal, engineering, and other applications.
2. Description of the Background Art
Presently, authorizing signatures are a necessary part of the work environment. Timed and dated authorizations or orders, a clear sequence of responsibility, are needed in engineering, legal, business, financial, and medical operations. Often obtaining these signatures is an efficiency limiting factor in these processes; be it for a purchase order, authorization to begin an engineering procedure, singing a contract, or medical orders.
One of these work environments is the medical environment where large numbers of timely secure physician authorizations are necessary for patient care, billing procedures, medicolegal protection, and reviews by certifying agencies. Often dozens, or even more than 100 provider (physician) signatures are needed per day per medical facility. One problem that may arise is that often the signer is in a remote location. Obtaining these signatures reliably is time consuming for the provider and troublesome for the administrations of medical facilities.
Timely confirmation of medical orders is considered an important patient safety measure by The Joint Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS). Similarly, in the business, legal, engineering, and financial environments, obtaining timely, legally verifiable signatures is often a procedural rate limiting step; be it for a purchase order, a contract to be signed, or an engineering procedure to be authorized.
Current commercially available internet based digital signature systems, such as DocuSign, Echosign, and AgreenSign, are not intended for efficient high volume authorizations. These services may be slow and somewhat complex to use for the casual user. Security certificates of digital signatures may be weak. They do not use two-factor user identification and generally rely on insecure means such as unencrypted email for transmission of important documents. Furthermore, these services are not optimized for efficient smartphone or other mobile device use. While Xyzmo.com is oriented to smartphones, its usage may be cumbersome and document security and verifiability is suboptimal. None of these services are properly sequenced for efficiency, security, and ease of use. Rather, these solutions are intended for episodic use by specifically trained clerical personnel.
The majority of skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, and many long term acute care hospitals still use paper systems and will not be converted to fully electronic medical records for years, if ever. Freestanding medical service centers such as physical therapy, surgicenters, and outpatient rehabilitation centers need physician signatures for billing and documentation purposes. Homecare agencies, infusion pharmacies, durable medical equipment agencies also often use electronic systems for tracking billing and medical documentation. All of these agencies or facilities generate thousands, even multiples of tens of thousands of signature requests of providers per year. Most commonly, these remote signatures include telephone orders related to direct patient care, review of critical new patient information such as laboratory data or radiology data, confirming plans of care, and certifying patients' needing hospitalization, transfer, or placement in a facility. Obtaining these authentications is troublesome and time consuming process for both the medical organization and for the provider.
Efforts to fax paper copies of these important documents for signature to a physician's office or emailing the documents to the physician have not successfully addressed the problem. Often days or weeks go by before the provider signs the document. He/she often doesn't time and date the signature. Time shuffling papers and faxing is required of the provider's office personnel and of the personnel of the requesting facility. A simple efficient method to accomplish this task is needed.
Patient safety organizations such as JCAHO recommend that telephone orders and critical labs be reviewed within 48 hours but that simple goal has not been achieved often and is widely considered impractical. Clearly, 48 hour delays for review of potentially harmful orders and urgent patent information is not adequate either. What is needed is a near real-time review by the provider no matter where the provider is.
Medical informatics has special security requirements to guard and keep confidential personal health information (PHI). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountabilty Act of 1996 (HIPAA) has strict requirements as to how PHI can be safely and securely handled for the patient. Any instrument used to review patient data or orders must comply with these requirements.
Electronic Medical Record systems (EMR) are rapidly coming into use in acute care hospitals because the HITECH Act actually requires them to adopt EMR and actually pays them to do so. Many of these systems are admirably secure and comprehensive but they do not address the need for remote, rapid, efficient, high volume digital signatures. They may require the provider to sign in via a remote terminal. During most of the day physicians are not sitting in front of a computer and therefore the need is unmet. However, most North American physicians now use mobile devices with internet access which are with them all day. A method that allows them to promptly review and sign from these mobile device is needed.
The High Volume Digital Signature System (“HVDSS”) described here is a novel solution to the problems described above both in the medical environment and in the other cooperative activities such as engineering projects, corporate executive procedures, and business contracts and communications. The solutions described here exist in both a paper-to-digital form as well as a fully electronic form.
Therefore, it is an object of this invention to provide an improvement which overcomes the aforementioned inadequacies of the prior art devices and provides an improvement which is a significant contribution to the advancement of the electronic or digital signature art.
Another object of this invention is to provide a high-volume digital signature system which improves the efficiency and workflow of obtaining digital signatures.
The foregoing has outlined some of the pertinent objects of the invention. These objects should be construed to be merely illustrative of some of the more prominent features and applications of the intended invention. Many other beneficial results can be attained by applying the disclosed invention in a different manner or modifying the invention within the scope of the disclosure. Accordingly, other objects and a fuller understanding of the invention may be had by referring to the summary of the invention and the detailed description of the preferred embodiment in addition to the scope of the invention defined by the claims taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.